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Costco's deal to replace American Express with Visa as its exclusive credit-card company highlights an economic principle that should surprise no one. Consumers benefit when a business uses its market power to negotiate lower prices and passes along the savings to customers. Conservatives have championed such market forces for decades, arguing that if government regulators just got out of the way of businesses, consumers would be the big winners. That is, unless we're talking about drug prices. Medicare, the federal healthcare program, is prohibited by law from haggling with makers of prescription drugs over the prices paid by its 54 million beneficiaries. That bizarre...

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Costco's deal to replace American Express with Visa as its exclusive credit-card company highlights an economic principle that should surprise no one.
Consumers benefit when a business uses its market power to negotiate lower prices and passes along...

Imagine getting a layoff notice, then being ordered to train your replacement.
That's what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers,...

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that federal drug prosecutions dropped 6% last year as the Justice Department moved to pursue a fairer, smarter approach to enforcement.
In an address at the National Press Club, Holder...

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday issued sweeping revisions to Justice Department regulations governing seizures of cash and other property from people who are not charged with a crime.
The new policy will block state and local police departments...

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly doing fine after a procedure Wednesday to implant a stent in her right coronary artery. But this health scare is sure to revive the debate about whether the 81-year-old leader of the court’s...

President Obama will nominate Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, to replace Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general, the White House said Friday, a historic choice that would make her the first black woman to hold the post.
If Lynch is...

As President Obama announced Saturday that he would nominate U.S. Atty. Loretta Lynch to be the nation’s next attorney general, obstacles had already begun to appear on the path toward her confirmation.
The administration’s rocky relationship with...

Sen. Charles E. Grassley is fond of calling himself "a pig farmer from Iowa," but both friends and political opponents don't buy the country rube image.
The 81-year-old Republican is expected Thursday to become the first nonlawyer to be elected...

President Obama will wait until after the November election to name a nominee for attorney general, setting the stage for an intense battle in the postelection Senate that could last until Christmas, a White House official said Tuesday.
The delay,...

Pulling the curtain back on long-hidden industry relationships, the federal government revealed that U.S. doctors and teaching hospitals had $3.5 billion worth of financial ties with drug and medical-device makers in the last five months of 2013.
The...

Opening the book on long-hidden industry relationships, the federal government revealed nearly $3.5 billion worth of payments and other ties that U.S. doctors and teaching hospitals have with drug and medical-device companies.
These financial details,...

In a campaign so far defined by hogs and chickens, the race for the open Iowa Senate seat that most expected to fall to Democrats is now perhaps the closest in the country.
And with the control of the Senate majority at stake in the upcoming election,...

More than half a million young immigrants who were granted temporary deportation waivers can apply for a two-year extension, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday, in what may be a template for more sweeping White House action before the...

WASHINGTON — For decades the Republican Party prided itself for being tough on crime, often putting Democrats on the defensive by pushing for longer, mandatory sentences for convicts.
In 1988, that hard-line stance helped sink the presidential dreams...

University of California regents agreed to pay $10 million to the former chairman of UCLA's orthopedic surgery department, who had alleged that the well-known medical school allowed doctors to take industry payments that may have compromised patient care....

WASHINGTON — In a surprising defeat for President Obama, the Democratic-controlled Senate on Wednesday blocked his pick to head the Justice Department's civil rights division, the first time in his presidency that one of his nominees failed to muster even...

President Obama’s pick to assume oversight of his signature health law received added bipartisan support Wednesday as more Republicans joined Democrats backing her nomination for secretary of Health and Human Services.
The growing support all but...

Congressional legislators in California and several other states took aim at campus sexual assault Wednesday, introducing two bills that would require universities and colleges to provide more support and training to combat the problem.
Campuses that...